Only vegetarians will be allowed to go to Mars

If you want to be in the first wave of Mars colonists, your best bet is to buddy up to Elon Musk — cofounder of PayPal, CEO of Tesla Motors, and all-around smartest guy in the room regardless of the room. He wants to start a space settlement in the next 10 years, and he’s inviting 80,000 colonists. “Buddying up” in this case means giving him $500,000 — that’s the cost of a ticket on this space ride — but apparently it also means giving up bacon. Because Musk has now said that only vegetarians will be allowed in his Martian paradise.

The plan is to make the Mars colony sustainable, which is a tall order for a city with a 140-million-mile commute. Musk plans for a pressurized greenhouse for farming, and a rocket that runs on liquid oxygen and methane. But he does not plan for a slaughterhouse, so meat-eaters can just stay home.

It’s not totally clear whether this is a self-righteousness thing, where Musk can’t abide being trapped in a dome with you if you have animal blood on your hands, or a more pragmatic “if you come you will have to quit eating meat because we cannot be bothered to grow a piglet” deal. RT.com reported that “Musk will only allow vegetarians to live in his settlement” but that’s fairly ambiguous. Either way, though, if you’ve got your heart set on colonizing Mars, you might as well quit eating meat now to get on Musk’s good side. Bonus: If enough of us do it, we’ll take down the industrial meat farming industry, and maybe buy ourselves a few more years before we have to flee the planet.

Update: Musk is now saying on Twitter that carnivores are OK too, which is frankly a little bit of a disappointment. You don’t really want to farm space pigs, do you, Elon?